This is a six-days-working-week. We were diving under the ice again taking sediment cores because strong wind made it impossible to go by boat. Nico, our French diver, left us on Monday and took a photo from upstairs.

Dive Site - Ice Hole, Ny-Alesund Harbour

Serripes, Serripes and Serripes collecting at Brandal… this bivalve is hiding in the sandy bottom being afraid of walruses that easily take around 400 of them for breakfast. While I was starring at the bottom concentrated on taking six of the small sediment cores for Bonnie a walrus was starring at me hanging at the surface…puffing and taking my sun away. Actually, that was the only thing I recognized, strange noises and a shadow which I though would be a cloud, boat or something…”well they would asked me to come up if there was a walrus”, I was thinking. But as he or she was just interested and did not want to play with me, they kept me underwater.
On our way back the tide performed a nice extravaganza starring ice plates embedding our boat…the same today.

Enclosing.

So we walked on the plates pulling the boat, we transformed it into an ice breaker and we were patient… it took us one or two hours to get through. Bloody hell of gorgeous ice formations melting during a dance between blue and white.

79° N

1st May 2009

Talking to people about diving in the arctic creates amazing features on their faces. There is everything from marvelling to simply head-shaking. By the way it’s been the same expressions I had on my own face.

I only had one modest wish… I wanted the fjord to be free of ice. But the arctic obviously writes its own story and created a beautiful stabile ice cover of frozen plates. But also beautiful from below? Claustrophobia? One will see. Diving under the ice means we had to cut, saw and drill a nice hole first. It took us hours before the first diver could plunge into the piece of dark amidst the white of snow and ice… and then, wait a minute, where is the light, didn’t we talk about light shining through the ice cover…may be I should have taken a lamp… ah ok, my eyes got there job done and indeed, there appeared an underwater in scattered light of various brilliance. Brightness due to rifts and clefts and then again big shadows of huge plates of more than 1 meter thickness. Fantastic. Seals send their rhythmical sounds and so do the movements of the ice plates. My air is accumulating below the ice forming small quicksilvern pools reflecting this surreal environment.

Arctic ice diving is captivating.

2nd May 2009

Temperatures climb towards zero, steadily. That means carved ice holes get mushy and ice plates crack suprisingly. Today’s job was to core for sediment samples. Besides the fact of bad-tempered weather, which bothered us with scourging wind and snow (the frequency of laughter around our hole decreases directly proportional to increasing wind speed), still a frozen fjord does not make work easier. Snow and clouds stole our light. To reach the sampling site 25 meters away with that big heavy box with empty corers means crawling through the mud as elegantly as possible, murmuring a Mantra of apologies to the benthic guys. Thank god we already sampled for most of them the days before, so at least they have three more weeks spending their live for science and world peace. Isn’t it always about world peace?!

Yeah well, finally arrived at the site, trying to core and slowly realizing the forlornness of this proposition because of stones below the first five centimetres of sediment…so packing everything together and crawling back… did I mentioned the non-existing visibility that appears right after touching the muddy ground? No? I love the rope on which the diver is fixed with the surface! So, in the end it’s simple, ice means no boat means no sediment cores. But the scientists exercise patience and they do quite well in my opinion.

But the wind has big plans for the next days and thereby coming from the right direction. So may be the ice will betake itself quite soon.